


exhale

by foxglovebrew



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: First Kiss, Getting Together, M/M, Post Season 6, Returning to Earth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-31 11:49:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15118790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxglovebrew/pseuds/foxglovebrew
Summary: Shiro hadn’t known how he missed the sunset shades of the desert until he saw them again.





	exhale

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, S6 turned me into a shell of my former self, incapable of talking about anything but Sheith.
> 
> As always, only lightly proofread. All mistakes are my own.

Shiro hadn’t known how he missed the sunset shades of the desert until he saw them again.

It’s funny. When he first moved here from Japan he thought this place would never feel like home.

Only in leaving had he discovered that he belonged to Earth. That anywhere on its watery, windy, scarred surface—he was home.

He watches the startling blue of the sky from Keith’s back porch. He lets his lungs fill with air that is not too thin, not too thick, that fits in his chest just right. It smells like dust and sunlight. It smells just as summer ought to.

What a luxury, to breathe.

Keith’s wolf comes bounding towards him, looking like a bright, blue-and-black stain on the scenery. Incongruous, like something from a dream. He blinks wide eyes at Shiro and settles at his feet.

The way his eyes close, his pointed snout resting on Shiro’s knee, reminds him that his world has changed.

“Good boy,” Shiro says, petting the wolf gently. His eyes close, pleased, and a huff of warm breath brushes Shiro’s hand. Real.

Shiro is thinking about his clone.

Tracing the edges of his memories to find the place where they diverge. It’s not that he can feel him in his head—it’s that he feels those days as if he had lived them from two different perspectives. The clone’s staged escape from the Galra facility, his days with the team, that silly show they put on, all the battles he fought. And his own hazy days in the endless astral dark, coming to only briefly to watch through Black’s eyes.

He remembers the clone’s rising anxiety, his nightmares so like his own. How he had wanted nothing more than to be a shield for good. He remembers every moment he’d been under Haggar’s spell and fighting to kill Keith. His agony and horror when he’d broken out of her mind control and found out what he’d done.

And even through the haze of fury, the way his heart had stuttered when Keith said—

“You didn’t deserve this,” Shiro says, in the dim morning light. Keith’s wolf raises his head, but Shiro is not talking to him.

He can’t find the edges of the clone’s consciousness within him, but it is there. He is not gone. Shiro is not the clone, but he is not quite the man he was before he died either. 

“Shiro.”

He hears Keith’s voice behind him, and his boots treading softly on the porch. Shiro turns around and finds him standing with the light in his eyes, back in his civilian clothes.

He hasn’t seen Keith’s red jacket in a long time. It had always been a little big for him in the shoulders. It fits just right now.

Maybe this is the only peace he can find for his clone—he lives still, as Shiro lives, and gets to see Keith another day.

“Hey,” Shiro says.

The wolf perks up immediately and abandons Shiro’s thigh in favor of stretching up towards Keith, nose reaching for a pat. Shiro is the opposite of offended. The wolf clearly has taste.

“Hey, boy,” Keith says, and as soon as he sits down next to Shiro he finds himself with an armful of enthusiastic space canine. “Woah, there. Yes, I missed you, too.”

Shiro watches him lit up by the morning light, laughing and snorting as the wolf tries to lick his face and knock him backwards. The wolf is huge. Keith holds his ground.

 _I missed you_ , Shiro thinks, and he’s sure it shows on his face, because when Keith turns towards him, his eyes go soft.

He remembers seeing those eyes, that look, at the end of everything.

The wolf finally desists, and contents himself with curling up at Keith’s feet. Keith leans back on his hands and sighs.

“What are you doing out here?” he asks, at length.

Shiro shrugs. He should probably go back to tracing the outline of the horizon, as he’d been doing, but Keith’s profile is more compelling. Keith turns towards him and raises an eloquent eyebrow.

“Just thinking,” Shiro says.

“About?” Keith says. It’s a little tentative. And moot. Even of the painful things, there is nothing he wouldn’t share with Keith. No honesty Keith hasn’t earned.

Still, it isn’t easy. It makes Shiro feel stripped down and vulnerable, as he says, “The clone.”

  _My clone._

Keith’s smile drops, his eyes going suddenly somber. A little sad. Something in Shiro clenches in relief, when Keith’s face doesn’t harden, when his eyes stay gentle and soft.

“Oh,” Keith says. His fingers find the electric blue fur on the wolf’s snout, and trace it absent-mindedly. “I did wonder—”

Shiro waits for him to finish, and when he doesn’t, he prompts, “What?”

Keith ducks his head—a little subconscious gesture that looks oddly vulnerable. Young. Like Keith before all this.

“I wondered whether he knew—whether he knew he was a clone.”

“He didn’t,” Shiro replies, immediately, before he can ponder whether it’s wise. But there’s a knot in his throat, desperate to let Keith know that—that it had all been real.

Shiro is Shiro _and_ the clone now, and all parts of him need Keith to know the truth.

Keith’s head whips around to look at him, eyes widening.

“How can you be sure?” Keith asks. There’s something in his voice, something Shiro recognizes. That same desperation. “I thought—I thought he probably didn’t know. The way he looked, when I cut off his arm… but I couldn’t be sure.”

Shiro remembers that moment. The great agony of looking into Keith’s scarred face, clear-headed for the first time.

“I know,” Shiro says. “I—when Allura put me into his body, he was not erased. I have his thoughts. His memories.”

He hardly breathes, waiting for Keith’s reaction. His shoulders go tight, tension in every line of his body, and then he exhales. It looks like something like relief, and sorrow, and panic all at once.

His eyes close. Shiro wants to reach out and smooth the line creasing his brow.

Keith is sitting on his left side, where his arm is. The cauterized, pointed scar on his cheek is facing Shiro. He wants to touch that too—can almost see it. Brushing a knuckle along the line of Keith’s jaw, like a soft touch might undo the damage.

He touches Keith’s shoulder instead. It’s their thing. It’s safe.

Keith startles under it and—unexpectedly, he goes red. The same sunset blush as the desert in front of them. He looks at Shiro for one long, awkward moment, and then clears his throat.

“I have to—” he says, and stands. The wolf follows his movement, watching closely. So does Shiro. “I should put another load of laundry in. As long as we have a washing machine, right?”

It’s a flimsy excuse, and Shiro makes eye contact with the wolf as Keith slinks back inside.

“What happened?” he asks him. The wolf huffs, in what Shiro is almost sure means, _Who knows? I love him, but he makes no sense sometimes._

Or maybe Shiro is just projecting.

*

That night, when everyone has gone to bed—mostly camped out in their lions, though Krolia and Romelle are set up in the one bedroom in Keith’s shack—Shiro wanders into the kitchen, trying to make no noise. It’s a very small shack, Keith’s. He closes the door gently behind himself.

The sound of the tap running sounds impossibly loud, but he splashes himself nevertheless, and pours himself a glass of water. His reflection looks back at him, in the dark window.

The white hair will never not be startling. He raises his hand to tug at the locks in his eyes—that, at least, has been white for a while—and makes a face at himself.

“Oh,” Keith says, behind him.

When Shiro turns, he finds him lingering in the door in a worn grey shirt and sweatpants. Shiro thinks he remembers those, from before. They used to pool at Keith’s ankles and track on the ground.

“Same idea?” Shiro says, trying to lighten the mood. Keith is staring at him a bit intensely, and while Shiro wouldn’t usually complain about that, he can’t help but think about earlier.

And how Keith had run.

He has—a theory. An idea. About why Keith might have left in such a hurry. Keith used to do that, a long time ago, whenever he felt he’d bared something to Shiro. Some vulnerability he wasn’t ready to let go of.

It’s been a long time since that’s been necessary. There aren’t many things about Keith he doesn’t know.

Keith visibly shakes himself, and throws him a sheepish, still absolutely heart-rending smile.

“Can’t sleep,” Keith says. Then the smile morphs into a grin. “Checking yourself out in the window?”

Shiro takes the diversion gladly, and huffs a laugh.

“I guess I finally look like an old man, after all,” Shiro says. “Lance has been calling me that for ages, anyway.”

“Since when is it a good idea to listen to Lance?” Keith says, a little uncharitably, though his grin is still in place. It softens, as he says, “I think it makes you look younger, actually.”

Shiro turns around, to hide whatever his face decides to do in response to that. He reaches for the cupboard, where he knows there is leftover sliced bread from their surreptitious run to the grocery store in town.

Even toast feels like a luxury. Plain ass sliced white bread, toasted. It’s a damn miracle.

It’s a little easier to maneuver around the missing arm, after a few weeks of practice. He keeps stumbling on stupid thoughts like _I bet I could toast the bread with my Galra arm_. Silly things. He tries to ignore the faint nausea in his stomach at the reminder of what that arm had done to him.

“It’s funny,” he says, to hide the fact that it’s not funny at all. “I lost this arm over a year ago, and I only just now feel like I _lost an arm_.”

It’s not altogether accurate—he’d buried the horror of losing his arm somewhere among the blurry memories of his time as the Champion, but he’d never quite _not_ felt its loss. Phantom pain had hounded him about it, too.

He thinks Keith knows what he means, though, judging by his look when he comes to lean against the counter by Shiro. He’s only just now having to deal with what it’s like to perform mundane tasks with only one arm.

Keith grabs the peanut butter from the cupboard. Shiro, personally, still doesn’t know what the big fuss about peanut butter is about, and he nudges Keith’s hip. It feels daringly normal, like something he might have done years ago.

Keith rolls his eyes, and grabs the jar right next to the peanut butter. An off-brand chocolate-and-cream swirl concoction. It’s half-empty, because fake brand or no, it’s still chocolate, and they’ve all missed chocolate.

They form a neat toast assembly line, Shiro and Keith, seamless.

“Hunk and Pidge are already working on a replacement arm,” Keith says, after a while. “You should keep an eye on that. By the time they’re done, your arm will be able to make coffee for you. Slice _and_ toast your breakfast.”

Shiro shrugs, and says, “I don’t mind it so much.”

He tries to find the words to explain that, complicated and frustrating as it may sometimes be, it is oddly freeing to take the time to learn how to be what he is—a guy with one arm. To learn again how to be in this body, just as it is. Make it comfortable. Make it his.

“It’s not too bad—taking a break,” he says, in the end. From the look Keith sends him, somehow, Shiro gets the impression that some of his thoughts made it through.

Suddenly, the whole world seems to hinge on the way the cheap, yellow lights bounce off Keith’s hair, on the way he looks—soft, in his sleepwear, smiling tentatively up at Shiro.

It’s too much—all of it. The memory of death, and being on Earth again, and having a moment to breathe. And he and Keith, dancing this same old dance even after everything they’ve been through.

His last thought, before dying, had been— _not yet._ There was so much to do yet. So much world to save. So many things unsaid.

So many things yet to say to Keith.

And what is he doing, now, after everything… hesitating? Again? Still?

He takes a deep breath. “Keith,” he says. “I remember what you said. To him. To _me_.”

Keith goes still, unsubtly rigid. His eyes take that peculiar, hunted look. It makes him look younger.

“You called me your brother,” Shiro says, and he can see Keith’s lip part. They’re pale, dry. A flash of tongue wets them. “Keith. I don’t want to be your brother.”

Shiro’s voice cracks on the words. He knows he closed his eyes against them—inevitable, burning through him as they have for years now—because when he opens them Keith is looking at him, raw and hurt. And Shiro knows he’s said it all wrong.

He takes Keith’s wrist, where he’s holding onto the counter, knuckles white.

“Keith,” he says. “What I’m trying to say is—”

Absurd. That his hand still shakes, that his heart still beats against his chest like it’s trying to break through. That the whole universe seems to be holding his breath as his hand slides into Keith’s.

It’s a small movement. Going from holding Keith’s wrist to holding his hand. It is insurmountable. He can tell Keith knows this by the way his eyes widen.

Shiro has always known this was a step he couldn’t un-take. He has considered taking it a hundred times—a hundred chances to brush Keith’s hair out of his face, to lace his fingers through Keith’s, to trace the line of Keith’s jaw. He’s thought about putting his hands on Keith’s hips, the small of Keith’s back, the long line of his neck.

“I’m saying I love you, too,” Shiro says. It comes out small, half-broken.

Keith’s breath rushing out of him is the loudest thing in the universe.

Shiro can’t help swaying into his gravity, stepping close. Keith’s fingers tighten around his, and make his heart beat double-time.

“Please,” Shiro says. “If I’ve got it all wrong, you’ve gotta tell me.”

Shiro has seen Keith scared plenty of times—this is not quite that. It’s close, though. His brow is furrowed, his lips pursed, and his hand shakes minutely when it comes up to rest gently against Shiro’s chest. It kicks the world into motion again.

“I thought—” Keith says. His voice is low, steady. “I thought that’s what we were. I thought that’s what you wanted.”

Shiro can’t do anything but stand there, mouth parted, and shake his head, breath stuttering out of him.

Keith’s hand is still in his. The only certainty. And then Keith is closer, _so close_ , and his forehead coming to rest against Shiro’s chest.

“Is that what _you_ want?” Shiro asks, finally, voice reed-thin.

And in the still, quiet night, in their shack in the desert, a few miles from the Garrison that brought them together—Keith shakes his head.

“I don’t want to be your brother,” he says.

Everything in Shiro exhales.

It is a familiar position to find himself in. Keith is leaning close to his chest, their hands between their bodies, except Shiro can’t pull him closer without untangling their fingers. It’s no great loss, because it allows him to do something he hasn’t let himself do before.

He leans his cheek against Keith’s hair, and inhales deeply. His hair’s a little damp from his shower, and smells dizzyingly familiar—the own-brand shampoo from the store in town.

Keith pulls back, and Shiro’s cheek ends up sliding against his temple. When Keith tilts his head up he’s—closer than Shiro expected. He grew in height, too, in those unseen two years. Their noses brush. Keith’s warm breath puffs against Shiro’s cheek, and then stops.

They stand there, close, holding their breath.

“Can I?” Shiro asks, though his hand is already abandoning Keith’s, which falls against his chest too. He raises it, finally, following all those hopeless daydreams, and brushes Keith’s jaw. Slow. Just as good as he thought it would be.

Keith kisses him first. Shiro should have expected that. Keith has never taken anything lying down. His hands slide quick around Shiro’s neck, and pull him down, and Shiro is being kissed.

His body reacts before his mind has quite caught up with the fact of Keith kissing him. _Kissing_ him.

Keith’s mouth is warm and a little chapped, and it rests against his, soft, for a moment. Keith pulls back. He takes a quick breath, which washes against Shiro’s mouth.

It is no more than the space of a breath. Shiro doesn’t know which of them kisses first, this time, only that they’re suddenly surging against each other, and Keith’s tongue is against his lips.

He makes a sharp, plaintive sound against Keith’s mouth, and feels Keith gasp against him. He wraps his arm around Keith’s waist, then, and pulls him in, until the long, warm line of Keith’s body is pressed against him.

His head is spinning—Keith’s body, and his hands sliding into his hair, and his mouth opening hot and wet against his mouth. The world could end, and the stars explode, out there, and he’d know none of it, and keep drinking kisses from Keith’s mouth.

When Keith pulls back, his eyes are wide and dark, and his mouth ruined. His hands are steady, grounding, at each side of Shiro’s jaw, like Keith is going to keep him here forever.

It’s a nice thought. Even nicer, is Keith’s smile aimed up at him.

“Um,” Keith says, licking his lips. His looks a little smug, his cheeks flushed. “Is this what you had in mind?”

Shiro looks at him for a long moment—his wet mouth and dark eyes, the scar on his cheek, the smile on his face. The absurdity of the situation hits him—he died, and came back, and is standing here in the shack at the beginning of everything, and Keith just kissed him.

His breath leaves him, stuttering out in slightly hysterical laughter. Keith’s eyes widen in alarm, and somehow it only makes Shiro laugh harder. He ducks his head into Keith’s shoulder, and feels the laughter travel through Keith’s body in turn.

It’s nothing short of a goddamn miracle.

*

The next morning, Shiro wakes up with the sun in his eyes, a crick in his neck, and a weight on his chest.

Keith’s lumpy old couch has done a number on his back, and Keith’s wolf is licking his foot.

Keith’s hair is in his face. His chests rises and falls gently against Shiro’s chest. He can see the odd frown that always wrinkles Keith’s brow when he sleeps, and the flushed top of his cheekbone, begging for kisses.

His back is loudly protesting, and yet, Shiro couldn't be paid to move.

Instead, he tucks his nose into Keith’s hair and breathes in.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about Shiro and how he might feel about his clone, and death, and returning home. I tried to cram them all here. If it's overdramatic, it's because I haven't stopped screaming since I saw S6 and it all had to go somewhere.
> 
> I'm on tumblr as of approximately five minutes ago! Reblogs on this fic's post would mean the world to me. I'm [foxglovebrew,](http://foxglovebrew.tumblr.com/) you can't miss me.


End file.
